i88a.] 
Analyses of Books . 
607 
individual. Did we follow her guidance we might stamp out 
ruffianism as decidedly as genius has been stamped out in Spain. 
But some of our moralists foster crimes of violence — and in one 
case disease also— -just as distinctly as the receiver of stolen goods 
cherishes theft. 
The author, however, we are glad to perceive and to declare, 
does not propose to turn dangerous criminals loose upon society 
as is done by our ticket-of-leave system, under the absurd notion 
that submission and quiet demeanour during imprisonment prove 
that the offender is reclaimed. 
On the question of free will the author writes : — “ No intelli- 
gent man can possibly believe that a man’s will is always free, 
when we see the number of persons whose whole lives have been 
controlled by the will of others, so that they became mere auto- 
mata. Who if he had a free will would ever allow memory to 
haunt him, thinking of a thousand things of the past to render 
him unhappy. Most certainly we cannot always govern our 
thoughts by our will, and it is equally certain that we cannot by 
our will govern our desires, words, and deeds. Mere children 
have no will, yet we in our folly treat them as if they had.” 
We cannot admit all this : we admit that we cannot completely 
control our thoughts, but the words and deeds of a normal man 
are at his command. Most parents find that children manifest 
a will at a very early age. 
This work, containing much which we approve, and, on the 
other hand, also no little from which we differ, is worth careful 
reading. An index or table of contents would have increased its 
value. 
The Law of Kosmic Order: an Investigation of the Physical 
Aspect of Time . By Robert Brown, Jun., F.S.A. Lon- 
don : Longmans and Co. 
The reader may well be disposed to ask how a law of cosmic 
order can be reached by any analysis of ancient myths and tra- 
ditions, or by any inquiries into the roots of words. Unless he 
has a power of reading between the lines, and discovering there 
something which escapes our ken, he will not find any fully satis- 
factory answer to his question. 
Mr. Brown undertakes to show how the zodiacal signs, “ which 
seem to us so singular, attained their present position by a process 
so natural as to be almost inevitable ; in fact by virtue of that simple 
law of re-duplication which, combined with the anthropomorphic 
principle, is the key to the vast majority of mythic fancies.” He 
discards as baseless " theories which connect the Signs of the 
